1 October 2020
Recent court testimony by a Syrian regime “gravedigger” reveals an organized, bureaucratic mass murder machine on a scale larger than previously understood.
Damascus
From nuns in London to Sufi shaykhas in Damascus, Farrah Akbik recalls the women who shaped her childhood—and the dear friend who helped her escape them.
So powerful are Washington’s new sanctions on Syria that even some opponents of Assad are unsure about them. Our own Syrian reporters have a range of views, two of which are presented head-to-head in this article.
Given a rare permit to fly on a military plane from Aleppo to Damascus, our writer encountered soldiers, judges, relatives of high-ranking officials, and a mysterious group of Iranian passengers.
Damascus resident Karam Mansour writes a first-hand account of life in the now-empty Syrian capital, where militiamen patrol the streets, shops do business in secret, and the homeless have abruptly disappeared.
As Assad’s health minister smirks about the army “cleansing Syria of bacteria,” doctors in Damascus, Aleppo, and Idlib tell Al-Jumhuriya they are woefully ill-prepared to deal with a Coronavirus outbreak.
After last week’s arrest in France of a former “Army of Islam” spokesman, Orwa Khalife recounts the gruesome history of the militia, from kidnappings in the Damascus suburbs to ethnic cleansing in the Turkish border zone.
Alia Malek's often-powerful portrait of her Damascus home sheds light on the perils and pleasures of Syria's pre-war society, but also leaves questions unresolved, writes Eric Reidy.
Using videos of Western-style parties in Syria, the Assad regime has sought to portray itself as a defender of liberal modernity against benighted "terrorist" opponents. Yet these crude and dishonest propaganda efforts only underscore the oppression at the heart of Assad's state, writes Robin Jones.
Beaten, humiliated, then sent as cannon fodder to the ISIS frontlines: A former defector recounts his experience of “reconciliation” with the Assad regime, which appears more interested in punishing its defeated opponents than making peace with them.
A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.
An essential new book by the only international journalist to have lived full-time in Damascus post-2011 shows the Assad regime’s criminality to be even worse than previously understood.